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Would You Like a Smile With That?

To cut down on waiting time for customers, many cash registers line the main counter of a Pret a Manger store in London.Credit
Hazel Thompson for The New York Times

SOMETHING weird is happening inside a Pret a Manger sandwich shop on Broadway in Midtown Manhattan.

It’s not all those quirky British sandwiches, thin and understated with ingredients like free-range egg mayonnaise and avocado-and-pine-nut filling.

No, it’s the employees. The cashier is asking New Yorkers how they are doing — and genuinely seems to want an answer. The guy who is throwing out the garbage offers customers a cup of water. The manager swings by to commiserate about the sweltering weather.

This is fast food? In Manhattan?

Pret a Manger, the veddy British chain, has gained a foothold in our McWorld of burgers and fries, where you can fun-size this, combo that and, let’s face it, sort of expect sullen service.

Next to, say, McDonald’s, Pret a Manger amounts to a fleck of relish, if that. Last year, Pret posted sales of £327.5 million, or about $534 million at current exchange rates. The take at McDonald’s: $24 billion. But Pret a Manger — the name means “ready to eat” in French — is slowly expanding in New York and other American cities with its own brand of grab-and-go food and, more significantly, a fresh approach to fast-food service. Pret feels almost nothing like an American chain. At a Starbucks in Midtown, you can wait 10 minutes for your latte during the morning rush. At Pret, the goal is to serve customers within 60 seconds. At some fast-food outlets in the city, cashiers might fling your cheeseburger across the counter, Frisbee-style. At Pret, they compliment your earrings.

What makes Pret a Manger a compelling business case study is its approach to customer service and to training and motivating its staff. Yes, Pret happens to make sandwiches — but the lessons are worth knowing, whatever your line of work.

Many businesses have trouble getting longtime employees to work well and, in particular, to work well together. But Pret has managed to build productive, friendly crews out of relatively low-paid, transient employees. And its workers seem pretty happy about it. Its annual work force turnover rate is about 60 percent — low for the fast-food industry, where the rate is normally 300 to 400 percent.

At the request of Sunday Business, Francis Flynn, a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, reviewed some of the management practices of Pret a Manger. He liked what he saw.

“A lot of people think about these jobs as almost hopeless when it comes to motivating the employees who work there, and it’s kind of sad, and I also think it’s incorrect,” Professor Flynn said. “My sense is there’s a really holistic approach, a comprehensive approach, to development.”

Pret is succeeding with just such an out-of-the-box approach. So far this year, the sales in its 34 American stores — in New York, Chicago and Washington — have increased 40 percent from the same period last year. The company’s total profits, with its approximately 225 British shops contributing the most by far, rose about 37 percent, to £46 million ($75 million) in 2010. Pret plans to expand further in the United States, and in — yipes! — Paris, where it plans to open two shops this year.

How does Pret a Manger do it? To find out, I went to London to learn about the company’s approach to training and teamwork, as well as how to make a proper Pret sandwich. When I landed, I grabbed a coffee at a Pret shop across my from hotel and watched a thin, shaggy-haired employee pick up garbage and sweep the floor. He was skipping as he worked.

This, I thought, was going to be interesting.

CLIVE SCHLEE, the chief executive of Pret a Manger, steps out of the company’s headquarters near Victoria Station and into the morning bustle of central London. Over the next hour or so, we walk to five Pret a Manger shops, two Starbucks, two branches of Eat (a London competitor), an outpost of Le Pain Quotidien, a Sainsbury’s grocery store and a local sandwich shop. We also visit a variation on a Pret store that the company may take to the suburbs.

Along the way, Mr. Schlee, a lanky Brit with a patrician but friendly air, recounts the history of Pret a Manger.

It all began in 1986, when Julian Metcalfe and Sinclair Beecham, who had been college friends in London, believed that they couldn’t find a decent sandwich. Many other Britons apparently felt the same way. By 2001, Pret a Manger had 100 stores in Britain and was moving into the United States. Mr. Metcalfe and Mr. Beecham sold a third of the company to, of all companies, McDonald’s, for an estimated £26 million ($43 million).

After the McDonald’s investment, the founders “got pushed like mad” to expand, says Mr. Schlee, who was appointed chief executive in 2003. (The founders, still investors in the company, have other hospitality businesses.)

Pret added more stores in the United States without figuring out some basics — the fact that some Americans are not fond of mayonnaise, for example, and that we tend to drink more drip coffee than espresso or lattes. Overextended, Pret lost sales and closed stores.

“We burnt ourselves quite badly,” Mr. Schlee says.

In 2008, McDonald’s sold its stake, and a private investment firm, Bridgepoint Capital, bought a majority of Pret for about £345 million. Bridgepoint still controls the company.

These days, Pret seems to have its operation down pat. At 9:30 in the morning at a Pret near Victoria Station, there is no customer line. There rarely is.

“A very important part of Pret is you see four, five, six to nine people on till,” says Mr. Schlee, using the Britishism for cash register. “Pret a Manger does mean ready to eat — kapow! — not ready to wait.”

At a nearby Starbucks, there is just one cashier, versus five to seven at a typical Pret. Mr. Schlee picks up a wrapped Starbucks sandwich, flips it over and views the sell-by date. Pret a Manger sandwiches don’t have sell-by dates — they are made daily, and what doesn’t sell is donated to food banks.

At Eat (unrelated to E.A.T. in New York), Mr. Schlee points to the smudged plastic window on the packaging of a beef-and-spicy-bean-salsa sandwich. That is from handling during transportation, he says. Pret sandwiches never travel by truck, even for delivery orders. Deliveries are made by foot, with a trolley. (Niall MacArthur, co-founder of Eat, says its sandwiches are made in a central kitchen each morning and sent to shops.)

How does any company encourage teamwork? At Pret a Manger, executives say, the answer is to hire, pay and promote based on — believe it or not — qualities like cheerfulness.

There is a certain “Survivor” element to all of this. New hires are sent to a Pret a Manger shop for a six-hour day, and then the employees there vote whether to keep them or not. Ninety percent of prospects get a thumbs-up. Those who are voted out are sent home with £35 ($57), no hard feelings.

The crucial factor is gaining support from existing employees. Those workers have skin in the game: bonuses are awarded based on the performance of an entire team, not individuals. Pret workers know that a bad hire could cost them money.

Pret also sends “mystery shoppers” — people who anonymously visit and grade the stores — to every shop each week. Those shoppers give employee-specific critiques. (”Bill didn’t smile at the till,” for instance.) If a mystery shopper scores a shop as “outstanding” — 86 percent of stores usually qualify — all of the employees get a £1-per-hour bonus, based on a week’s pay, so full-timers get around $73. “There’s a lot of peer pressure,” said Andrea Wareham, the human resources director at Pret.

Pret reinforces the teamwork concept in other ways. When employees are promoted or pass training milestones, they receive at least £50 in vouchers, a payment that Pret calls a “shooting star.” But instead of keeping the bonus, the employees must give the money to colleagues, people who have helped them along the way.

There are other rewards. Every quarter, the top 10 percent of stores, as ranked by mystery-shopper scores, receive about £30 per employee for a party. The top executives at Pret get 60 “Wow” cards, with scratch-off rewards like £10 or an iPod, to hand out each year to employees who strike them as particularly good. Pret has all-staff parties twice a year, and managers get a monthly budget of £100 or so to spend on drinks or outings for their workers.

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Every new employee gets a thick binder of instructions. It states, for example, that employees should be “bustling around and being active” on the floor, not “standing around looking bored.” It encourages them to occasionally hand out free coffee or cakes to regulars, and not “hide your true character” with customers.

By their third month, employees have to pass a written quiz with questions like “What is the maximum time a customer should wait in line?” and show that they are proficient in dozens of practical criteria. Then they become “team member stars,” or T.M.S.’s, and then can move up to food preparation positions like “hot chef,” who oversees soups, pastries and other hot foods, en route to more senior management positions.

Not all employees are enthusiastic about Pret’s career tracks. At one store, Mr. Schlee introduces himself to a tired-looking employee on her lunch break. He jovially asks if she is a T.M.S. She shrugs and gives him a look as if he’s a parent trying to be cool.

It takes about three months to become a hot chef. It might seem that the training would cover procedures like making soup or baking croissants. But Pret has standardized so much — soups, for example, are sent to the shops premade and in plastic bags, and ovens are preprogrammed for each baked item— that the training is largely about food safety and disposal. A hot chef relying only on Pret’s training could have a hard time as a restaurant line cook, or even cooking a meal at home. Yet during a training class in London, employees were taking notes and asking questions as the trainer went over things like why they shouldn’t dump old soup down the toilet.

“That’s actually a very reasonable way to approach motivation,” he says. “Having them make continual progress provides them with feedback that they are doing what they need to be doing.”

THE streets are still wet from an early-morning cleaning on Eastcastle Street, not far from Paddington Station. It’s not yet 6:45, but Petronela Roman, with a big brunette topknot and cat-eye eyeliner, is making coffee for co-workers at a Pret store. Upstairs, employees put on white coats with red Pret logos. A barista from Brazil sprays himself with cologne.

At 7 o’clock, as the store manager, Lenka Karlovic, wraps up the morning meeting and employees are still downing their coffee, the first customer walks in. Flicking crumbs from her fingers, a worker rushes over with a "hello." The scream of the latte machine follows, and it’s off to the races.

It’s giddy in the kitchen at the back of the shop. It smells of chutney and mayonnaise, and Lukasz Gorczynski, who is training to become a kitchen supervisor, has his iPod blaring the Black Eyed Peas. Eight or so workers are running into the giant refrigerator, placing tomatoes on sandwiches, scooping mayonnaise from buckets and slicing through sandwiches with an electric-powered knife.

“Lemon juice, guys!” someone shouts.

“Open bread, guys!” says another.

Mr. Gorczynski and Ms. Karlovic have determined what must be ready when, based on average sales and the weather. The clock is running: Mr. Gorczynski’s task list includes making six bowls of granola within 1 minute and 17 seconds; 24 edamame packs within 6 minutes and 2 seconds; 20 containers of honey-granola within 6 minutes and 17 seconds. Berry bowls, muesli bowls, porridge toppings — the list goes on. The food is taken to the shop floor as soon as it is finished, and hundreds of sandwiches, salads and other items must all be in the cases by 10:30 a.m.

“These are theoretical times,” Mr. Gorczynski says. But “if we’re late in the morning, then we’re late later on.”

Anita Varga, who has been at Pret for just a week, is having trouble with her ham and Pret pickle sandwiches. “Anita, can you make sure you spread corner to corner?” Mr. Gorczynski says. “See, on the picture?”

Each employee has both a recipe card and a picture of how the sandwich or salad is supposed to look. I join one worker, Monika Pietka, in putting sandwiches into boxes. But getting a sliced B.L.T. into a box without squishing the bread, smearing the box window or having lettuce fall to floor isn’t so easy. Ms. Pietka smiles. “It’s easier for us,” she says.

Ms. Roman is training to be a hot chef, and, after eight months at Pret, a promotion would mean a raise to £7.90 an hour from £7.30.

She has been training with Ms. Karlovic, filling out workbooks and taking quizzes. After lunch, it is time for Ms. Roman’s final test: with Ms. Karlovic watching, she has to train someone else. She calls over Aurora Amador.

Ms. Roman sticks to the manual. She introduces herself, even though the two had just been eating lunch together, and they begin to review baking as though it’s a catechism class.

“You have to use the gloves,” Ms. Roman says.

Ms. Amador nods solemnly. “I will.”

Ms. Karlovic marks her notebook as Ms. Roman progresses, then calls the kitchen workers to gather as Ms. Roman waits nervously by the stove.

The employees start clapping and shouting, and some customers do, too. Then the assistant manager shoos everyone away — “Go back to the kitchen! Get on, get on!” Standing next to the case of croissants, Ms. Roman has tears in her eyes.

A FEW weeks later, back in Manhattan, the line is forming at the Pret a Manger at Broadway and 39th Street. The air-conditioning isn’t working, and it’s 83 degrees outside. One cashier is wiping his brow with a napkin. Another is screeching: “Who’s ordering iced drinks? Coffee?”

This, apparently, is the New York interpretation of the suggestion in Pret’s training manual to, after greeting the customer, “check if they would like any hot drinks or croissants so that they can be ordered first.”

Another cashier is greeting everyone with “How you doing, sweetie?” — which might seem appropriate for a 15-year-old, but not so much for the gray-haired man to whom she spoke.

It seems that the American employees, or at least the New Yorkers, have yet to fully embrace the Pret ethos.

But then I see two employees shuttling between the kitchen and the shelves, trying to restock sandwiches as fast as the customers take them. It’s hard to keep up.

Then an employee swings by. “Everything O.K., miss? You good? You need any help with anything, let me know,” he says.

A few minutes later, the same employee is busing the table, even though that isn’t his job. Seeing that the supply of sandwiches is running low, the woman working with him dashes to the kitchen. She’s isn’t skipping, but hey, this is New York.

A version of this article appears in print on August 7, 2011, on Page BU1 of the New York edition with the headline: Would You Like a Smile With That?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe